Puck Daddy Power Rankings: NHL on NBC; arbitration system; the Maple Lous
[Author’s note: Power rankings are usually three things: Bad, wrong, and boring. You typically know just as well as the authors which teams won what games against who and what it all means, so our moving the Red Wings up four spots or whatever really doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t know. Who’s hot, who’s not, who cares? For this reason, we’re doing a power ranking of things that are usually not teams. You’ll see what I mean.]
6. The TV schedule
People love to complain about the U.S. national TV schedule every year, and the reason is that it is usually bad.
Like, look, you want to put the teams on TV that are going to draw the biggest audiences, and teams with the biggest fanbases tend to be in population centers in the Northeastern U.S. There are exceptions to the rule — Chicago and Detroit, for example — but that’s why every NBCSN game feels like it’s contractually obligated to feature one of the Rangers, Flyers, Penguins, or Bruins.
That perception isn’t far off from reality.
These two networks will show 99 games in the regular season, meaning there are 198 opportunities to appear on national TV. The top four teams in terms of individual appearances — Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Detroit — collectively occupy more than one-third of all those opportunities. The next eight teams — the Wild, Rangers, Blues, Bruins, Avalanche, Sharks, Kings, and Capitals — make up another 45 percent or so.
The other 18 teams in the league divide just 42 appearances between them, or 21 percent.
And again, it’s easy to understand why, but also: No one should have to see 17 Flyers games next season. No one deserves that.
5. The current arbitration system
Let’s say you’re Braden Holtby. You go into arbitration with a dollar figure in mind, and when it goes public, everyone is like, “WHAT? BRADEN HOLTBY WANTS TO HAVE THE SECOND-HIGHEST GOALIE AAV?” Meanwhile, no one had much to say.
No one — including Holtby — thinks he’s worth that much money (you can tell by the contract he signed, which actually provides the Caps a bit of a discount). Nor did the Caps think Holtby was actually worth as little as they asked for. The problem isn’t what either sought in arbitration, but rather the system that allows and/or forces them to ask for it.
The arbitrator in these situations is given two parameters between which he or she must work: The team’s number (usually pretty low), and the player’s number (usually pretty high). Often, the arbitrator’s decision falls about 40-60 percent between those two numbers.
So it behooves the teams to shoot mega-low and players to go super-high in these cases. If they don’t (and Mike Hoffman didn’t, for reasons which are not immediately clear) they’re likely to end up screwing themselves in the long run. And what that usually leads to, because of the arbitrators’ tendency to go more or less right down the middle with these things, is guys getting roughly fair deals, or working out longer-term contracts along the same parameters. Usually, if anyone comes out ahead, it’s the team rather than the player.
So what it amounts to is: This system sucks and no one’s really at fault when they ask for a silly ruling, low or high.
4. Keeping the shootout
Here’s that thing the Commish said on that thing that basically no one likes but the league is intent to keep anyway because it creates a false sort of parity:
“I think to the extent some people wanted to see fewer shootouts, this will get us there, and that’s fine. The shootout isn’t going anywhere. You go to a building during a shootout, everybody’s on their feet, nobody is leaving, which is what it was designed to do. It’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s entertaining, and so if we’re going to try and reduce the number of shootouts, this may do it.”
The “this” here is obviously 3-on-3 overtime which, as we’ve explored before, probably doesn’t do as much as everyone thinks it will to make shootout results less prevalent in league standings. Bettman also makes the unimpeachable argument that before there was a shootout the league had ties, and no one liked those either.
I wonder if that’s actually true, or if it’s true any more. The sports world has changed a lot since 2004, with soccer in particular being immensely more popular now than it was then. And soccer has lots of ties. And no one cares.
Is the average hockey fan today opposed to ties as a general concept? Maybe. Are they as opposed to it as they were more than a decade ago? I would personally doubt it. Are they more opposed to it than they are the shootout? I’d like to see some polling on that.
3. Fantasy casting
Last week, Jake Gyllenhaal went on Howard Stern to talk about the new boxing movie where I bet the boxer overcomes odds, and revealed that he was up for a role in the original Mighty Ducks movie, but his parents told him he had to go to junior high instead.
This got me thinking: Who would Gyllenhaal have played? It’s easy to see him in several roles. Charlie Conway, obviously. He could have been a decent Averman. Fulton Reed, maybe. Adam Banks, no two ways about that. I can’t see him as a Guy Germaine. Maybe a kid from the Hawks?
For me, though? Should have played 10-year-old Gordon Bombay who misses the shot. He would have killed that part, and still had time to go to all the junior high he wanted.
2. Avoiding Canada
I love the uniquely Canadian idea that the NHL hates Canada and wants it to fail in hockey forever. That’s why the league is actively avoiding putting expansion teams in places like Moncton and Brandon and Saskatoon and Whistler.
That’s why it accepted only one Canadian application for expansion last week! Definitely not because it only received one Canadian application. It’s all well and good for Cam to say, “Well hey there Gord there really oughta be a second team in Toronto hey?” And Gord goes, “Ya, Cam? Pretty good market we got there. Better than Phoenix that’s fer sher.”
Gord and Cam are right. Toronto might even be able to support three NHL teams, but the thing with markets being able to support teams is someone in that place has to have the ability to build a rink and run one. No one in Toronto or anywhere else in Canada besides Quebec City has that. So there’s not a team there.
I acknowledge that reasonable observation of this whole expansion situation has declined north of the 49th at much the same rate as the Loonie since the Glendale situation went even south-er, but good lord. Put on yer thinkin’ touques here.
1. The Toronto Maple Lous
Everyone in hockey got caught with their pants not only down but all the way off and somewhere across the room when the Leafs hired Lou Lamoriello to be their GM. Maybe because there was no way to see it coming in any logical universe, and also because it is a bad move by an organization that has clearly been making a lot of rather good ones lately.
Let’s be clear: They needed someone to be the GM, and while a few candidates were certainly kicking around, none had the experience Lamoriello brings to the table. And no one is happier to tell you about Lamoriello’s experience than anyone who still, somehow, thinks he’s good at his job. “Three Stanley Cups!* (*none since they instituted a salary cap)” is not, perhaps, the best argument in his favor, but boy you hear it a lot. Hey, Randy Carlyle won a Cup more recently, and that somehow doesn’t make him a good coach.
In recent years, Lamoriello has gotten bad at drafting, developing, signing, and trading for players, all of which are crucial to being a good general manager.
Now, with all that having been said, the Leafs have hired so many executives in the last two years or so that there is some level of safety measure built into all this. Effectively, there are so many layers to the decision-making process that Lamoriello probably can’t screw up any one move too badly. But at the same time, he has “full autonomy” to make whatever decisions he likes, and that leads to night terrors related to, say, the thinking which led to the Ryane Clowe contract.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say Lamoriello is in this job in much the same way Jim Rutherford is in his job in Pittsburgh: To train the front office’s younger executives (in this case Kyle Dubas) in the ways of working the phones and doing all the GM-y things you learn on the job. How many years could Lamoriello possibly have left as a high-level NHL executive to begin with? There has to be a succession plan in place. He’ll be 73 in late October.
But in the meantime, there’s certainly plenty of reason to wonder whether all the smart moves Toronto has made in the last year-plus could be undone.
The good news is that Lamoriello’s adversarial relationship with the relatively small number of Devils media is going to make for some hilarious temper tantrums from the Toronto press corps.
(Not ranked this week: The White Man.
Oh no, all the fans who don’t think North Dakota’s old nickname is racist don’t like any of the new nicknames proposed. Probably because they aren’t racist enough, I guess.)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
MORE FROM YAHOO SPORTS:
